Optimizely Content Cloud

Develop content rapidly for marketing initiatives. Landing pages, or lead generation. Manage SEO effectively. Easy to understand site structure. Easy to manage assets, files, images, etc. Easy to manage access rights and permissions. Easy to assign personalization for various content pieces.

I found the CMS relatively easy and intuitive to learn and use. However, I'm coming from a background having mastered several Enterprise-grade CMS solutions. I was put into a situation where I had to learn and manage on the fly with zero training. The training was available but it's unrealistic when you're also expected to keep an entire organization moving forward. Where I see most of the complaints come from are those who are not technical enough and preach they know it all. Specifically, those who come from a wordpress background. They rely mostly on what they have survived day to day on from a google search for most of their career and tend to struggle to understand the benefits of managed services, security, or the impacts and dangers that enterprise solutions can protect against. Experience in front-end coding is essential to unlocking more potential from the CMS but not necessary if the expectation of the individual is to just take orders and do simple edits or tasks. Training is required for those that are not familiar with Enterprise CMS solutions. Training resources do not teach out-of-the-box thinking or innovative approaches to solving problems and overcoming roadblocks. I would be interested in throwing someone with no enterprise-level CMS experience into Optimizely without training and seeing if they sink or swim.

Optimizely [Content Cloud] is one of the most Practical CMS's in the market which has all the necessary features to manage the website. Excellent speed and performance and user satisfaction in the front end are very good. customers and users are satisfied with the content because we display the published content according to the nature and taste of the customers and their geographical area, and all the content is categorized according to the user group. If you have a lot of content and you are a developer or IT consultant of a large organization that needs various and special facilities, I suggest you use Optimizely [Content Cloud] because it meets all your needs.

Excellent software with tools and professional functions that facilitate the work of our entire marketing strategy. What I like the most about Optimizely [Content Cloud] is the recommendations and support that it provides us with its reports and metadata obtained over the years to optimize our electronic commerce, campaigns, and digital content.

We selected Optimizely based on the following requirements: * Ability to build template-based responsive websites * Good Website Navigation and Search Tools * Ability to identify website customer groups and provide personalized associated portals and user experience - Content personalization based on prior activity * Security, Security Groups, password-protected portal areas, and document level security - backend * Integration with the company's Single Sign-On (SSO) * The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance * Website Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy * Data collection points, Web Analytics and Reporting * Integration with the company's CRM * Ecommerce portal, payment processing (PayPal) and order management (CRM) * Integration with Social Networks (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube) * Email Marketing Integration * Scalability and High-Load Capabilities * Potential support for multiple languages (e.g., English and Spanish)

We are moving off Sitecore which is a great solution. We find Optimizely (EPI) more user-friendly and easier to use.

The beauty of Optimizely Content Cloud is that it is scalable. You can have a single-page app or thousands of pages. It has the ability to schedule content publishing and the expiry of content. So if you are building a news site where your articles auto-expire and become available elsewhere on the site, it will do that with ease. Page creation can be drag-and-drop. You are able to move things around on the fly. The search functionality can also be used to generate content on the fly based on search criteria. You can plugin the commerce module and, suddenly, you are also running a store.

Using Optimizely Content Cloud is easy. The on-screen editing feature gives an instant preview. The layout is organized, with a content tree (the site structure) and the search feature making it easy to navigate the site as a content author. The ability to reuse content on multiple pages means we don't have to duplicate content. The preview of where a content block is already being used on the site is a great time-saving feature too!

It is well suited to allowing users to easily add and configure content on our site. It is not well suited to using images of all sizes as these often break the look and feel of the site and require further image editing, which is time-consuming.

It's simple and intuitive. It doesn't require a master's degree to operate it. Most things make sense and are where they should be.

It is best for large enterprises that have lots of content editors, and need the flexibility to be able to develop lots of custom functionality.

It offers great flexibility for experienced users but is not particularly easy for novices to learn quickly.

Our tech team is really happy with [Optimizely Content Cloud], but it continues to come up short on service and support.

The technology is fine. In my opinion, the problem is support when it is needed. As stated earlier, we continue to have to beg for a response to our requests. We are working on an upgrade, and it took weeks for our contractor (a certified Epi partner) to get help from [Episerver's] support team.

[Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud)] is very flexible and allows personalization of the content to specific visitors' groups[.]

The training is a key to successfully adapt to this platform. Once the training done, the platform is easy to use and flexible.

This is a best-in-class CMS. Be very specific in your requirements before building, as it can do almost anything you want it to, it just needs to be developed in a certain way. Best used for websites with a lot of content, like sales sites or blogs, or corporate sites. Probably not suitable for building a customer portal or logged-in interface.

As a content author, it can be a lot of clicking, but once you get the hang of it, it gets easy to navigate and work quickly.

If a company is looking for a well supported and easy to use CMS, Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud) would be easy to recommend. The product has been refined for several years and is well supported both by direct contact with support and by the community. You do however need to have someone with experience of working with the product in order to feel comfortable with development.

Some things can be quite counterintuitive to work with, and unfortunately, Optimizely Content Cloud still uses .NET Framework instead of .NET Core for its backend code. This makes it slightly more difficult to work with for new developers who are only educated with Core, albeit not a very big hurdle. However, once you get a feel for how blocks and pages work, it makes the development of editorial content efficient.

I find that Episerver/Optimizely CMS is a great enterprise solution. It is great for managing multiple domains and subdomains within the same organization. I have not used this CMS for e-commerce but that may be one weak point. For content optimization, SEO-related work, and content production, the CMS provides a great experience with lots of flexibility and ease of organization.

As a web content specialist with some technical background, Optimizely is fairly easy to use. As an enterprise-level CMS, it is simple to switch between domains, sections, and pages. I have quick access to some fundamental admin settings that I use on a regular basis. It also provides features to add custom HTML, CSS, JS, and other scripts as needed that are pretty straightforward. My only concern with usability is when it comes to training others in our organization who are not familiar with web development or using a CMS.

Optimizely [Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud)] is versatile enough that it can be used in most situations but users that benefit from a development team that can setup complex integration jobs to their PIM/ERP will benefit the most. Some advanced knowledge of SQL will go a long way in allowing front line users and admins to trouble for their development teams along with coming up with additional job requests and/or features.

As a CMS, Optimizely [Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud)] is extremely easy to use and stands with other easy to uses CMS in both their simplicity and ability to support more complex functions. Where Optimizely [Content Cloud] stands out is in it's feature list which frequently saves time, money and headaches by simplifying what would typically be a multi-step process in a single or two step process.

It would be best suited for a website that is blog or webpage focused. It is not ideal for e-commerce websites, especially sites like ours that have 100's of similar products. It requires a lot of manual intervention to remove large sections of the site from being indexed, while keeping other things in. I wouldn't expect it to be out of the box.

For me, there was a definite learning curve with this application. I had to schedule time with a power user to ask questions and get clarification on a variety of sections. For example, it's not clear to the user how the topics are defined/gathered. I ended up in a completely different area that had no explanation or context that turned out to be a sort of "library" of content topics that had nothing to do with our website.

It would be nice if marketing automation would be included in the basic Episerver CMS. Now, it's a different license to buy. Licenses are quite expensive for small and medium-sized companies.

Episerver CMS is well suited for a site with many editors and pages. You will find that it is fast to get going and develop for, and thanks to the large community you will find help and suggestions. It is easy to make integrations with other systems. A scenario where it is less suited is for example when building complex forms.

Episerver CMS is user friendly and our colleagues learn the system pretty fast. It's much easier to manage than the old system, and we see a big strength in having all of our market websites on this platform.

Until they can get the entire package able to be on .Net core, I cannot recommend this product. Legacy .Net hosting models are a thing of the past. Episerver needs to embrace .Net core and headless first to be able to gain support or other systems will take its place.

Episerver CMS is good when you have bigger page-structure, and it’s easy to sort & order content. All product-data is managed in our Pim, so we leave all content for Episerver but it's well synchronised with our Pim.

Episerver CMS provides a very well rounded system that will meet the needs of most businesses, in my experience. The biggest draw-back that I've seen with the underlying system is the response time in the back-end. Being on the digital experience cloud allows you to spread the load between services, but our experience has shown, even with a distributed network, the response time on the back-end can prove time-consuming and have delays in loading for content writers/editors. If there's a lot of hands-on, constantly, you will need to make sure the architecture has the response time your team needs.

Quickly set up sites and get powerful pages using Episerver CMS.

Content Management is very well organized.

Episerver is best used, in my opinion for a small collection of sites. We utilize Episerver for a very LARGE number of sites and tend to encounter issues with some of the tools and extensions of other providers. Another piece is that at a large site number collection, there is a significant impact on database performance.

If you are going to build a full-blown CMS system with a lot of users/editors and have money for it, then go for Episerver. If you are looking for a CMS system that is cheap, look for another tool.

We have a lot (thousands) of technical documents on our website and we have very specific needs for them. We are a trade organization with varying levels of membership, and thus need to restrict certain content to specific user groups. Additionally, some of our content is free, some we charge for, and some have different prices for different groups. It gets very involved, but Episerver handles it well for the most part. So while the web content isn't displayed in the most aesthetically appealing of ways, it is at least there and only visible to those who should see it. So I'd say that it really just depends on your specific needs. If you're looking for something simple and won't have tons of content and PDFs and academic journals, etc. for different user groups, then another CMS will likely be better for you. If you do need specific functionality like what I've explained, then yes, Episerver could work well for you.